In Snow Leopard newly created Disk Images, both unencrypted and encrypted, will default to the use of Icon View for display. Changing the View type to List, Cover Flow, or Column View and then closing the window and reopening the window causes the view to revert to Icon View. Ejecting and remounting the image will also lose any changes and revert to Icon View.

Deleting the .DS_Store file on the mounted image does not help, and there is nothing in com.apple.finder.plist that seems to affect this. This is quite vexing, and appears to be present in all revisions of Snow Leopard, at least through 10.6.4.

It should now change to 'Always open in * view,' where * is the view you just changed to.

Check the box. It will save your preferred setting.

This is a Finder bug. The expected behavior is that the 'Always open in * view' checkbox should adjust to the view that you've selected. 10.5 handled this correctly.

[crarko adds: This hint was inspired by this thread in the MacOSXHints forums. I keep customer data in encrypted Disk Images all the time, and as I prefer Column View this was driving me crazy after upgrading to Snow Leopard.]

This hint did not work for me. I have an encrypted dmg. I checked the icon view, switched to column, unchecked, it showed "Always open in column view", I checked it, closed the options window, closed the dmg. When I reopened the dmg it was back in icon view. Tried it 3 times. 10.6.4 btw.